Complete Guide to Facebook Marketing

Unless you've been living on another planet, you would be aware of the popularity and influence of Facebook today.

Just a few short years ago, you had to encourage all your family and friends to join this social networking website (just after others convinced you to join). Nowadays, it's rare to find someone who hasn't got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to online traffic. You are then able to understand how important Facebook marketing has become for all websites.

It's Not A Pitch Zone

The most important thing to remember about social media is that it is not a place to blatantly and endlessly pitch your product or service. If you do this, then you will not get any favours from social media users and will get largely ignored and even bad reviews.

What social media is used for is for building relationships with potential clients. There are several ways you can go about doing this:

- you can post helpful information (links) where you help them solve a problem
- you can personally chat with them and assist them you can create content addressing the needs of users and posting it

The bottom line is that you want to be seen as genuine and helpful. This way, word can get out that you're the real deal and before you know it, people will become interested in what you have to offer in terms of products and services.

Of course, the things you share on social networking sites such as Facebook shouldn't be the nitty gritty stuff that you have to offer. You should share helpful information in the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask and wonder if there's more. Offering free stuff is great for getting attention too.

How To Market On Facebook

The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As a result, it has developed many ways for users to do this. You don't have to use every single one of them but a combination of them can only enhance your Facebook marketing.

Pages

This is probably the marketing tool out there on Facebook. On its website Facebook describes Pages as "a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users." It is specifically designed for promoting a business and everything it has to offer. People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do this, they let their friends know that they've become a Fan of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time is great.

Of course, it all depends on the content you put out there for people to use. You need to give them a reason to become a Fan of your Page and a reason for them to keep being one.